On Poetry
From Billy Collins’ Masterclass.
==Whitman was the first to remove regular meter and rhyme away. He removed those two training wheels but the bicycle kept going.
This started a debate in the 1850s whether Song of Myself was poetry or not. One professor said, if this is not poetry, it is something greater than poetry.
==Walt Whitman
- ==had a general radical vision of himself as a poet.
- ==great self advertiser
- ==as a social and sexual liberator, he saw himself as a liberator of verse
- ==He knew that if he will remove rhyme and meter, he needs to replace it with something. He used some devices:
- ==anaphora: the lines begin the same way; instead of regularities at the end of the line, they are at the beginning (e.g., Crossing Brooklyn Ferry); he must’ve gotten it from liturgical prayer or Bible; chant
To Do
Review how Laura Walls differentiated Thoreau from Whitman